1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ultrasonic diagnostic device and an image processing device that are capable of imaging the strain of tissue.
2. Description of the Related Art
An ultrasonic diagnostic device includes an ultrasonic transmission and reception control unit that controls the ultrasonic transmission and reception, an ultrasonic transmitting and receiving unit that transmits and receives ultrasonic waves to and from an object to be examined, a tomographic scanning unit that repeatedly obtains tomographic image data in the object including moving tissue in a predetermined period, by using a reflective echo signal from the ultrasonic transmitting and receiving unit, and an image display unit that displays time series tomographic image data obtained by the tomographic scanning unit. The structure of a biomedical tissue inside the object is displayed as a B-mode image.
On the contrary, recently, a TSI (tissue strain imaging) method that images how much strain is generated in a predetermined tissue in a predetermined time is known. According to the TSI method, it is possible to quantitatively show the change in the strain using a graph by setting a ROI (region of interest) in a position of interest.
However, since the strain of the tissue is affected by various factors such as the tissue shape or the compression speed, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the strain. As one example of the quantitative evaluation methods, a result that introduced the examination of the strain ratio was reported (for example, refer to Jpn. J. Med. Ultrasonics, Vol. 32, Supplement (2006) P292). According to the report, when the linearity of the strain is formed by the compression, there is a possibility that the ratio of the interest portion serves as an indicator of the diagnosis. However, the display or treatment of the data concerning the diagnosis or setting the ROI is not disclosed.
Further, it is possible to draw a graph that quantitatively represents the change of the strain by setting the ROI into the position of interest and to output the strain value in a specified range with respect to the ROI set by a user (refer to FIG. 4) as a text. In FIG. 4, the strain values of six ROIs are measured at regular time intervals. Therefore, it is possible to manually calculate the strain ratio of two different ROIs on the basis of strain values of ROIs output at regular time intervals.
However, in order to obtain the strain ratio of the two different ROIs, the user calculates the strain ratio on the basis of text information by himself. Therefore, there are problems in that it takes a lot of work or time to calculate the strain ratio and errors are unavoidable when setting various ROIs.